Nightmares
by ConiferousSiblings
Summary: Dipper has been plagued by disturbing dreams lately and he believes that he's found the cause. Slight Pinecest undertones, but it is not the focus of the story at all.


**_The Journal of Dipper Pines, Paranormal Investigator/Highschool Student_**

_June 7__th_

I had the dream again last night. I think that I've been having it every night for at least two weeks, but its never been as clear as it was now and even hours after waking I can recall the details more easily than I can remember what I did yesterday when I was awake.

It always starts the same, I can remember that much from the other times at least. I'm alone on a huge flat plain – there is absolutely _nothing _as far as my eyes can see in every direction. No mountains, no trees, no buildings – just seemingly infinite nothing extending into forever. Even now I can remember how much it hurt my eyes to just look out at that empty horizon, and I woke up still feeling the loose powdery grey dust under my bare feet.

Yeah, I was naked in the dream for some reason too. That was fun.

I tried calling out for someone, I always do for some reason, but there's no one around to hear me. The empty air seems to just suck my words into it and they feel dull in my ears. Theres nothing around to echo my voice, and when I open my mouth to speak the air tastes stale and dusty. I feel my tongue go dry and gummy after I get tired of screaming for anyone to hear me and then I just shut up. No help is coming.

I pick a direction at random and just start walking, my feet kicking up little puffs of that dust – it stung my legs and floated up and made the air even harsher in my lungs but I didn't stop moving. I felt like I walked for hours, till my muscles burned and my bones creaked but I couldn't stop or even slow down. I had to keep pushing, hoping that I'd find _something _to tell me where I was. Maybe a way out, or at least a change of scenery. I'd pause to sit down and rest but no matter how long I sat or stretched the pain never went away and eventually I'd just get up again and start moving out of boredom. Every step hurt worse than the one before but I forced myself to take them. I wanted out of here, more than I've ever wanted anything else.

I'd lost track of how many times I'd started and stopped. The sky never changed from the flat cloudless blue, with no sun or stars or anything else that would tell me that time even existed anymore. I wondered if I was dead or if I'd been transported to another world or dimension. No answer made sense and eventually even thinking became a chore in that flat grey emptiness.

At one point I thought I could hear Mabel's voice in the distance and I ended up running and shouting and practically crying with relief at the thought that she was nearby – that I wasn't alone. She wasn't there though… for almost the first time in my life she wasn't there and I knew at that moment that I really was completely alone.

I just about gave up at that point – almost just sat down and closed my eyes and waited for it all to go away. I wish that I had, but I never do in the dream. No matter how much I wish it was different it doesn't end like this. Instead I spot something on the horizon – its misty and incredibly small but just the sight of _anything _breaking the endless monotony of that flat skyline is enough to send my heart thumping in my chest with excitement.

I run toward it and watch it grow clearer and clearer with each step – its a hill, steep and pointed. I draw closer and see that it gleams like brass in the hot weird light that saturates the sky. Instinctively I know it isn't a hill – its sides are too even, its angles too sharp. It must be a building then, or at least something that was made by hand instead of being a natural formation. At this point I couldn't care less _what _it is, I just want to get closer to it.

Most nights this is where things get foggy – normally I can't remember anything past spotting the hill and running. Its not that I wake up at that point on other nights, because I don't. I _know _when I wake up that the dream had continued on but it what happened afterwards had never stuck in my mind for some reason. Every night I had woken up to my sheets soaked with sweat and my heart pounding but I never knew why until last night.

I can remember it all now. I can remember realizing that the shape I saw was a pyramid. I can remember drawing closer and closer to it and watching it grow larger and larger, but I was still nowhere near it. Time passes and the pyramid is enormous – it stretches out so wide on each side that it occupies my whole field of vision in every direction, stretching out into the sky above so high that I can't see its point anymore. I'm still not even close to its base, but the size of it is enough to send cold sweat pouring out of me, running trails through the layer of powdery grime that I was coated in from the dust.

I stop at last and try to take in the sight and its almost too much for my mind to handle… its bigger than any mountain I've ever seen, bigger than I ever imagined anything could possibly be. I almost want to turn around and just move away from it, put as many miles between myself and the pyramid as I can but I can't force my body to move the way I want it to. I can't move at all anymore, my feet are practically nailed to the ground and my back is stiff. My eyes roll up in my head, drawing their way up the side of the pyramid on their own and fixing on one spot high up near where the pyramid starts to grow narrow.

A crack in the endless golden face of the pyramid has appeared – a thin line splitting it horizontally that seems to bleed out light. I can't even blink as the crack widens and lengthens and stretches until its not a crack anymore. It's a huge oval of white hot light that makes my eyes tear up just to look at it and I can see something moving across it. A spot of darkness that seems even darker because of the light surrounding it is growing in the center, widening until it forms a perfect circle – a hole large enough to swallow a 747 inside it without the wings touching the sides. All of a sudden it comes together in my mind, like seeing an optical illusion for the first time – its an eye.

Pyramid. Eye. Bill.

I know where I am then. I know it all at that point, but knowing doesn't help me move, doesn't help me speak. I'm locked frozen in place and no matter how hard I think that I'm free to do whatever I want here it doesn't happen.

The pupil of the eye rolls down and fixes on me and a rumble that shakes the earth under my feet splits the air, words louder than thunderstorms smashing against my eardrums.

"I TOLD YOU I WOULD BE WATCHING YOU."

_June 9__th_

Haven't slept as much as I should have lately. I can tell its starting to get to me, but whenever I lie down and close my I eyes I remember the dream and the pyramid. I don't know if he's there waiting for me or what I could do if he was. I don't have the Journal anymore and the relevant spells aren't available in your average library book… I'm not even sure if its even possible to travel into my own mind with the same magic that we used to go into Stan's.

I thought about telling Mabel, but can't bring myself to do it. I know that she'd just worry about me and be frustrated that there isn't anything she can do to help. I don't know if its more selfish of me to not tell her knowing that she'd freak out, or to tell her while knowing that I'd be stressing her out. I know she'd want me to tell her… I would if this was happening to her.

Then again maybe nothing is _actually _happening to me at all. If it really was Bill he could have blasted me with his powers at any point in the dream, or at any of the other times that I had it, and there wouldn't be much that I could do to stop him… What if its all just me dreaming, nothing supernatural involved?

Would that be more or less crazy than the possibility of being sleep-haunted by a vengeful dream-demon?

Last night the few hours of sleep I managed to get were dreamless and I'm hoping for a repeat tonight.

_June 10__th_

No such luck journal.

I don't know why I'm still writing in this thing. Maybe its just so that there will be some sort of record of what happened in case something goes terribly wrong.

I had _a _dream last night, but it wasn't _the _dream.

I was in the flat grey empty place again, but this time I _knew_ where I was right from the start. I knew it was all a dream and I was in control of my body instead of being trapped in some loop of scripted actions like a video-game character.

I wanted to play it smart, so I just decided to not move at all – I sat down in the dust and closed my eyes and kept whispering "Wake up" to myself over and over again. I did it for a long time, till the words lost all meaning and just became a flat noise croaking out from my dust-caked throat but nothing changed. I got bored after a few dull hours of this and opened my eyes. My blurry vision focused and then I screamed.

The pyramid was there, tiny on the horizon. I hadn't moved from the spot I started at, but it was there regardless. I blinked and it was closer, larger on the horizon than it had been before. That was enough for me – I turned away from it and started running as fast as I could in the opposite direction.

I ran hard, my lungs burning with each dust-choked breath I took and my feet stinging from the impact against the weird shifting floor but I didn't slow down. I looked back… even now I can't tell you why I looked back other than that instinct that makes us turn to see if the tiger chasing us has come any closer. The pyramid was gone.

I couldn't believe my luck. I shouldn't have believed my luck.

I turned back toward the direction I have been running and it was there now – huge and towering over me, its lake-sized eye of white fire and inky blackness wide and staring down at me with nothing close to a human expression.

Huge black columns snaked out from its sides and stretched out toward me, crossing the miles of distance separating me from the pyramid. I turned and ran again, but it was like trying to outrun your own shadow – I was caught up in stick-figure hands which had fingers thicker than redwood trunks and held tightly in their weird cold grip.

The hand brought me up to eye level and the voice rumbled out again, so close this time that I almost felt like my teeth were rattling in my skull from the force of them shaking the air.

"WHERE DO YOU THINK YOU ESCAPE TO INSIDE OF YOUR OWN HEAD?"

When my eyes opened it was 3 AM. I don't know if I'll be able to get back to sleep again tonight. I don't know if I should even try.

_June 13__th_

I tried everything, I swear I did. Pretty sure I've had more coffee these past few days than I've ever had in the rest of my life. Double strength, 8 sugars – the works.

Anytime I even thought of closing my eyes I made sure to pinch myself to keep from drifting off. I've watched all of the most action packed movies I could remember in a row and would lie awake at night with my headphones blasting my favorite albums at max volume. Anything and everything I could do to keep myself awake.

It didn't work. I'd gone almost 40 hours without sleep before I finally crashed _hard_ and ended up sleeping again.

When I found myself in the grey plain of the dream I almost wanted to break down and cry, but I managed to stay calm somehow.

If this was _my _dream, _my _head then why shouldn't I be able to be in control? I'd watched enough of those old Freddy Kreuger movies with Mabel to know that it should work… I mean, if the real world followed cheesy 80's monster movie logic that is.

First thing I did was imagine myself some clothes which, let me tell you, does a lot for your confidence if you're going to be fighting some sort of mind-demon. I imagined more than clothes though – I went all the way: a big suit of crazy space-armor straight out of a video-game, a jetpack, a rocket launcher, lightsabers, a magic shield… anything and everything that I thought could help me when he came again. I didn't know if any of it would actually work, but it made me feel a _lot _better than I had been when it was just me in my birthday suit against an other-dimensional monster. I was furious and pumped & so sure that this time, _this time _I would teach that weird demon that it shouldn't try to mess with Dipper Pines again.

Time passed and nothing changed. I was pacing in circles in the ear-aching silence, my hands full of sci-fi weapons and nothing to use them on. Even the novelty of having my very own dream lightsaber had already worn off since it just sort of hummed and I had nothing to cut but dirt. I'd gone from furious, to anxious and finally to bored.

So I was caught completely off-guard when the world suddenly grew dark. I turned my head up and saw him silhouetted against featureless blue sky, his whole body seeming to gleam like polished obsidian except for that huge white eye. He was even more massive than I could remember from the other times, like a huge triangular moon being pulled to the planets surface. Even his stupid top hat was the size of a skyscraper.

Suddenly all of my fancy dream-weapons and plans for fighting him just seemed completely pointless. I aimed and fired the rocket launcher at the huge eye but as I watched the missile streak up I saw it shrink to a speck and detonate in a puff of red flame that got lost in the darkness above me. I don't think it even reached him.

"CUTE TRY KID."

Arms that spanned the horizon reached down from above and sank building sized fingers into the earth and with a single tug they tore a city sized chunk of land out of the world, with me smack dab in the center. The air screamed around me as I was pulled at incredible speed up through the sky and closer to him. The air was thin and cold when the moving stopped and I could feel the pressure of him starting straight at me from above, like I was a germ under a microscope.

Fighting may have been useless at that point but I wasn't going down without having my say at least.

"What the hell do you want with me Bill?" I shouted up into the huge eye above me, my words sounding flat and dull in the thin air.

He didn't answer, but I could feel the ground around me start to shake so hard that it knocked me off my feet. I jerked my head and saw that his fingers holding onto the chunk of earth that I was on were starting to dig deep into it and crumble it like a brittle dirt clod. Cracks started forming at the edges and I could see lumps of earth the size of cars crumbling off and falling back to earth… we were so high up that I couldn't even hear them when they hit the ground.

I imagined the long fall and suddenly Mabel's fear of heights didn't seem so silly to me.

The ground around me was shrinking, bigger and bigger slabs of earth falling away from the edge with each passing second and larger and larger cracks shattering the surface. I could see his hands pulling in closer and closer to me, each outstretched finger larger than a building as they shredded the ground around me.

"Why are you doing this!?" I screamed, panic having finally overtaken my bravado.

The ground opened up beneath me and I fell screaming back to earth with the remains of the ground I was standing on shrieking through the air around me like meteors. Right before I hit the dirt I heard the rumble of his words tear through the air.

"BECAUSE I CAN."

The instant before impact I woke up, and I woke up screaming. My heart was thudding in my chest like a jackhammer and for a split second after I opened my eyes and saw nothing except the darkness of my room I was sure I was dead.

That illusion was pretty quickly shattered when my door was kicked in and a furious Mabel stood silhouetted against the doorway brandishing a baseball bat in one hand and her grappling hook in the other.

"I'll save you Dipper!" she screamed, right before she dashed in and started swinging the bat around like I'd decorated my room with invisible piñatas… thankfully she didn't manage to hit me and I was able to calm her down before she could break too much of my stuff.

"What the hecks going on in here anyway?" she had asked (after I'd managed to pry the bat out of her hands before she could completely finish off my computer).

Crap. What was I supposed to tell her?

_'Hey Mabel, remember that weird little triangle demon we met in Stan's mind a few years ago? Well he's decided to dream-torture me for the past few weeks for no reason.' _

That might worry her a bit.

"I had a bad dream," I said, quite lamely instead. I'd rather her just make fun of me for being a big dork than freak her out.

"Must have been some dream." she replied, and I saw her looking at me pretty hard in the dim light filtering in from the hallway.

I realized that I must have looked like a mess. Not sleeping for almost two days probably hadn't done me any favors, and between the circles under my eyes and the fact that I was covered in terror-sweat I don't think she really bought my explanation.

"Yeah, I guess it was." I said.

Mabel plopped down casually on the edge of my bed, kicking her feet in the air idly as she leaned her baseball bat against the bedpost. She still hadn't let go of the grappling hook, but I sometimes think that she'd rather lose an arm than that thing.

"Want to tell me what it was about?" she asked, her voice soft and with a gentle note that I'm not used to hearing most of the time.

For a second I really did. I wanted to tell her everything about the nightmares and just find a way to work together to solve it… I couldn't bring myself to drag her into it though so I stayed quiet.

"Not really… it was something dumb, thats all." I replied, a bit more gruffly than I'd intended to.

"Ok." Mabel said, surprisingly not sounding mad about the way I'd snapped at her.

She yawned loudly and when I turned and looked out into the hallway to check the old clock hanging there I realized that it was almost 4 AM.

"Move over," Mabel whispered, setting her grappling hook down on the table next to my bed and shoving me off to the side and closer to the wall.

"What do you think you're doing?" I asked.

"Sleeping over you big dummy. If you wake up screaming again it'll be a lot easier to quiet you down if I'm not a room away." Mabel replied as she burrowed under my covers and pulled them up to her chin.

"And who said this was okay?" I asked her again, more surprised by this than I had been about nearly dream-dying just a few moments before.

"Just lie down and get back to sleep Dip." Mabel said sleepily.

I wasn't really sure what to say to that. I sure as hell didn't want to sleep again, but I couldn't really go anywhere with Mabel boxing me in against the wall. I'd just about decided to try to get up and go down to the living room to watch television for the rest of the night when I felt her arm snake out around me like a teddy bear and lock on tight. It was weird, but somehow her just being here calmed me down a lot… I felt safer.

I managed to keep myself awake for another few minutes before I drifted off back to sleep but this time I didn't dream about anything.

_June 14__th_

When I woke up the next morning Mabel was gone… I was almost convinced that I'd hallucinated her showing up last night except for the fact that her baseball bat with its hot-pink duct tape grip was still leaning against the foot of my bed… also some of my things were pretty obviously broken from her 'heroic' rampage through my room. Her grappling hook wasn't on the table though, so she must have taken it back with her when she woke up.

I saw her down at the breakfast table eating one of those weird cereal blends she's been into lately. Probably Lucky Crunch or Captain Puffs or something – she always comes up with weird names for them. She looked up at me and gave me a small smile and I felt weirdly happy at the sight of it. I grabbed a bowl of cereal for myself and joined her at the table.

"You move around a lot in your sleep," Mabel said conversationally, "your future girlfriends probably going to have to wear a big padded suit to bed so you don't accidentally kick her to death one night."

"Sorry," I said, my ears burning a bit at the realization that the first girl I'd spent the night with was my sister. Not that we hadn't shared a bed when we were kids or had our share of sleepovers in the past or whatever, but that hadn't been in a long while.

"I'm just messing with you," she teased, "you were actually sleeping surprisingly peacefully for a guy who apparently suffers secret night-terrors or whatever it was that woke you up yesterday."

"Yeah… well thanks for coming to rescue me from whatever you thought it was last night." I said lamely.

"No problem – I know you'd do the same for me." she said with a smile.

"In a heartbeat." I replied.

I would have to. I've seen my share of weird and creepy things in my life, and Mabel's almost always been there at my side to help out… she's the one person I'd trust out of anyone in the world when things look bad to back me up, and I'd be right there with her if she needed me to. I love her.

Not in a _weird_ way or anything, but you know – like a brother. Which is what I am. Yup, lets just move on from that and forget all about it.

"Well now that its not all dark and spooky would you want to tell me about that dream that freaked you out? Was it about Gideon? Or that time we almost got eaten by dinosaurs? Was Bear-O involved and am I allowed to playfully mock you if he was?" Mabel pressed, waving her cereal spoon around excitedly as she peppered me with questions.

In the light of day all my past resolve to keep things secret just seemed silly. If it really was Bill what would stop him from going after Mabel when he finished with me? If nothing else me telling her could help her prepare… and maybe she really might have some idea for how to deal with the situation that I hadn't thought of.

So I spilled my guts, telling her everything that had been going on. It took a while to tell her the whole story but she didn't seem skeptical about it or act like I was crazy at any point. She asked a few questions here and there and she did stifle a snort of laughter and call me a dork when I accidentally mentioned that I tried to fight him with a dream lightsaber, but other than that she took it all completely seriously. When I finished my story I realized that I'd gotten a little breathless in telling it… just bringing it all up again had made the memories come back strongly and sent me into a minor panic.

Mabel reached across the table and wrapped her arms around my shoulders in a fairly awkward above-the-waist-still-sitting-down hug that still managed to feel like good.

"Why didn't you tell me sooner?" she asked, managing to sound both betrayed and concerned at the same time. I couldn't tell if she was mad at me, worried or (more likely) both.

"I didn't want to worry you." I said.

"Well duh I'm worried you idiot! Wouldn't you be worried if this crazy dream-monster junk was happening to me?" she snapped.

"Of course I would be! That's why I didn't want to tell you… but you know now, so lets just move on." I said.

"Yeah, fighting about it won't solve this problem any faster," she agreed.

"No it won't." I said.

"You're still a butt though." she added moodily.

"Noted."

"Alright, first order of business – exorcising that pointy little freak out of your brain." Mabel said as she tapped my forehead with her spoon to illustrate her point.

"I think you need to be a priest to do an exorcism." I pointed out, only slightly sarcastically. I don't know why but just the fact that we were talking about the situation made it seem a lot less terrible than it had felt before.

"Pfft, please – I've seen that movie like a hundred times by now. I can probably do one blindfolded." Mabel replied with a cheerful grin.

"Alright, so do we have a backup plan in case _The Exorcist _turns out to have been a _movie _and not a documentary or instruction manual for handling real demons?"

"Do you ever get weirded out when you realize that demons and ghosts and junk are all real?" Mabel asked, bouncing off-topic in typical Mabel fashion.

"Only when I'm awake… and apparently now when I'm asleep too." I said with slightly more sarcasm than before. She always manages to bring the snark out of me.

"Well first things first – we need to pack our bags." Mabel said briskly, hopping up from her seat and taking her empty cereal bowl to the sink.

"Why do we need to do that again?" I asked, now completely in the dark.

"For the trip to Gravity Falls of course. If we want to figure out how to _actually _get that little freak out of your head we're going to need the Journals that you left up at the Mystery Shack." Mabel said.

Like I said, she's really good at finding angles that I might not have thought of yet. At the sound of the idea my mind was racing with the possibilities… with the journal on our side I might actually stand a chance!

"Mabel you're a genius!" I exclaimed, feeling a little lightheaded at the hope that things might just work out.

"Of course I am – now c'mon, lets get our stuff together." Mabel said, turning back to me after she'd finished rinsing out her bowl.

I don't know why I did, aside from general giddiness I guess, but I got up from my chair and ran up to hug her. She was stiff in my arms for a second with surprise, but she hugged me back pretty tight and I could feel her breathing a little shakily against my chest.

"We're going to find a way to beat him, right Dipper?" she asked quietly, her face buried in my chest.

"Yeah, of course we are." I said, feeling slightly awkward now.

"Good… I… I don't know what I'd do if I lost you." she said, her voice shaking a little at the end of the sentence.

"Well you aren't going to," I said, "before he was just messing with me… but now he's got both of us to deal with. Anyone who could imagine shooting exploding kittens out of her hands is probably a force to be reckoned with in dreamland."

"Darn straight," she said with a laugh and her arms hugged me a little tighter.

We were still locked in a hug and now it felt a little beyond just awkward… I mean, it felt good having her close to me, but I felt weird for feeling good about it. Then again there's nothing weird about it really… I mean, human contact just feels nice – especially if you've been stressed and freaking out. So there's no reason that my heart beating a little too hard or my stomach doing backflips is weird or anything. Its all just totally normal 'I'm afraid that I'm going to get dream-murdered by an evil geometry diagram' nerves, thats all.

Eventually we both let go and shuffled apart a bit slowly. She gave me a small smile that didn't look quite as brittle as before.

"Well, what are we waiting for? Those bags aren't going to pack themselves – and mom's car definitely isn't going to hotwire itself either." Mabel said before she dashed up the stairs.

"Wait, what?" I called out to her, "I thought we were going to take the bus up again?"

"You have no sense of adventure!" she called back from halfway up the stairs.

She wasn't serious of course.

I hoped.


End file.
